Silas squeezed my fingers. “Do you want to go over there?”
I nodded, but I still couldn’t move. It was only when I heard a low growl of anger from Castor that I knew I needed to hear what he was hearing. I was, for all intents and purposes, the author of this situation and I needed to see it through to the end. No matter how many painful and shameful memories were dredged up in the process.
The men rearranged themselves slightly, and I found a place to listen. There was silence at first, and for a moment, I panicked that perhaps he was forcing her right this minute and she hadn’t managed to give any sort of signal, but then there was the clinking of glass against glass and deliberate footsteps.
“I don’t drink,” came Birgit’s muffled voice.
“It will help you relax,” Cunningham urged. I hated that voice, that voice that pretended he was being kind and attentive even as he forced you against your will. Like everything he did—even the defilement—was for your best interest and any protest on your part came from ignorance or petulance. Like you were just a selfish child and he was the patient adult trying to coax you into doing what you were supposed to do.
“I’d really rather not,” she insisted. “My father doesn’t approve of women drinking.”
“Your father isn’t here, is he?”
Van der Sant didn’t react, at least on the surface. There was a slight twitch to one eye, a careful rhythm to his breathing that told me he was trying to maintain complete control and that it was costing him significant effort.
“No,” Birgit said, and even through the door, I could hear the trembling in her voice. The fear. I swallowed, trying to stop the ball tightening in my throat as I felt my own fear again, my own remembered panic on the day Cunningham took my virginity and a piece of my soul.
You are not that girl anymore.
It was true. I’d worked so hard to make sure that my body was my own, that my sex was my own. That Molly only belonged to herself and not to the ghosts of the past. But that girl would also be there, somewhere, hiding inside of me. Waiting for the right events to bring her shivering and crying to the fore.
Cunningham murmured something, and Birgit cleared her throat loudly, launching into the script we’d rehearsed.
“Please, Mr. Cunningham, I don’t want to do this.”
“What you want doesn’t matter, Miss van der Sant. I think you know that already.”
“I don’t want to—” her voice broke off, thick with tears, and my own tears were coming now, welling up and clinging to my eyelashes.
“If you don’t give me what I want, I will ruin you. You understand that, right? I can ruin you. And now that you’re here—well, I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice. You will do what I want, and no one will believe you if you try to tell them.”
No one will believe you. Wasn’t that what I had told myself all these years? Why I’d kept his crimes a secret? Because who would believe the word of a woman over the word of a gentleman like him?
Except I could see how imprisoning that belief had been; maybe not everybody would have believed me, maybe not the public at large, but here were my three closest friends and all of them had plunged themselves into this situation to help as soon as they learned about it. They’d all believed me about Birgit. And they would have believed me about my own story. Warmth seeped in through the shame, not erasing it necessarily, but making it lighter, smaller. As if knowing what I felt, Silas wrapped an arm around my waist, and both Julian and Castor looked up at me with such expressions of friendship and trust that my tears did truly spill over. Julian frowned—he still didn’t know about Cunningham—only Silas knew how personally this affected me, how difficult it was for me to stand here and not relive every awful moment of my own torture. But I knew that if I told him, he would be exactly what I needed. Kind but not overbearing. Concerned but not pitying.
While I pondered this, the conversation had continued on the other side of the door. More of Cunningham’s evil words and more of Birgit’s tears, until finally van der Sant straightened abruptly. “I’ve heard enough,” he said tightly, and Castor was at the door in an instant to summon his men.
And then there were shouts, tables and chairs knocking over in a scuffle; and then Birgit was in her father’s arms, and the stoic Martjin van der Sant finally succumbed to the anger and pain he’d repressed all evening, sobbing into his daughter’s neck and apologizing profusely for whatever he’d done to make her doubt his love under any circumstance; and then the constables were called, and then there was Castor giving testimony along with van der Sant and Birgit herself, and Cunningham was brought away and I stood in the hallway as he passed.
“You,” he hissed as they dragged him away.
“Me,” I said. And the look he shot me was venomous enough to kill, but he couldn’t kil
l me in any sense any longer. He was finally exposed. He would be punished. And the part of me that was still fourteen, still a terrified virgin pretending to be brave, breathed a sigh of relief and closed her eyes at last.
“You’re shivering,” Silas said.
I was. In fact, I wasn’t even sure how we’d ended up in this carriage that was currently rattling me back to my house. Silas must have called for it…what had happened to the others? I vaguely remembered van der Sant wanting a physician to tend to Birgit’s nerves, Castor thundering words to the constables, who scrambled to obey the aristocrat, Julian clutching one of my arms while Silas clutched the other, and him murmuring to Silas, and Silas murmuring back over my head.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said, my teeth chattering. My hands shook so hard that I couldn’t even try to untie the bonnet I’d put on at some point.
“Catharsis,” Silas said in a gentle voice. “You’re purging something you’ve carried for a long time. You had to feel it all again, confront it all again, and now you’re able to let go of it.”
My shivering was so violent that I couldn’t even respond, and the tears came again. Silas moved over to my seat and crushed me against his chest.
And then we were home, and then he was carrying me, and then we were in my bed, fully clothed, his body curled protectively around mine, and I felt only a weary sort of peace as I slipped into a dreamless sleep.
When I woke, I woke up alone. I knew why Silas had felt so betrayed when I’d left him the other day; falling asleep in his arms had felt so deeply right that waking up and finding nothing next to me felt deeply wrong.
